Читать книгу The Trailhead - Kerri Webster - Страница 9

HULLS GULCH

Months from any tree becoming remotely fragrant yet one cannot remain in bed. What if, by the time things forsythia, we no longer recognize the flora, believe it’s some sort of apocalypse, are possibly afraid? The pall clots, a sharpness at the temples. The sky pretends at simple. I have no quarrel with figments. Night garden, whetstone, small alien ships of seedpods tangled on the barbed wire. Here is the skull of the hummingbird on a chain around my neck. Let us pretend it’s fleshed, the chain a leash; let us be sad souls who keep bones on silver threads. In the theater, the couple in the next row masturbated each other in the dark, dove noises as the city burned. After, I drove into the hills, past the reedy underbrush that pretends at fire. I hiked on; the pall did not dissolve, though I felt a little better, thank you.

Here the trailhead; here the sagebrush; here the creek, the glass house on the cliff, the telephone wires, the dust kicked up so that I am never without my vials of eye drops—“thinking for hours together of having the knife she gave me put in a silver-case—the hair in a Locket—and the Pocket Book in a gold net”—the absences tangible as hummingbird skulls. Having come to the trailhead, I crave a speechless place caught up in a gold net.

Grit in my teeth and the sky about to tear, I peer into the cleft two boulders make. Eye to the dark, I hear impossible water. I am learning to allow for visions. The cliffs give up a sound like howling, which merges with actual howling to become a system of enormous potential. A lightninged thicket; a road sliced out of winter; a tooth buried in the bark of a tree; a bowl of lathed yew; a ewe split like a peach but still bleating. I walk and walk. Like a jellyfish or annunciation, the heliodore-yellow underlying everything shimmers, is gone.

Often when I wake the furniture’s slightly haloed, sleeping pill screwing with the visual cortex, a pleasant holiness. I believe he went home with her smell on his fingers; I believe that on the trail are many handsome dogs. The acedia hums and hums. Soon, excess and magnolia, snow in the mountains moving toward us as runoff, great volumes of water pulled into the valley, swans on the riverbank drinking that snow. I will sit by the trail until my head stops hurting. I will try not to be afraid.